This invention relates to a hydrogen generating apparatus utilizing a concentration cell.
Steam power generation is a power-generating method in which fossil fuel such as coal or petroleum is burnt, steam is generated by utilizing heat formed by combustion, a turbine generator is rotated by steam and electric power is generated by rotation of the turbine. In other words, the energy of fossil fuel is once converted to a thermal energy and the thermal energy is then converted to mechanical power and the mechanical power is converted to electric power. This method for obtaining energy from fossil fuel has the following defects.
The first defect is that the utilization efficiency in conversion of an energy of fossil fuel to other energy is very low. The second defect is that fossil fuel is limited and when all the fossil fuel in the world is consumed, other energy sources will have to be found, and this problem of the conversion of the energy source is now impending. The third defect is that use of fossil fuel inevitably results in discharge of pollutants such as CO, SO.sub.x and NO.sub.x , and in order to further continue the use of fossil fuel, development of techniques and equipments for preventing environmental pollution by these pollutants will be necessary.
In view of the foregoing, hydrogen is noted as an energy source of good quality. More specifically, hydrogen generates water and very minute amounts of nitrogen oxides when it is burnt, and the combustion exhaust gas does not contain carbon dioxide gas or sulfur oxide. Accordingly, hydrogen causes no problem of environmental pollution. Further, if hydrogen is fed to a fuel cell, it can be effectively converted to an electric energy, and it can be stored as an energy source. Moreover, hydrogen can be used not only as an energy source but also as an industrial raw material leading to various valuable products.
However, a method capable of producing, at high efficiency, hydrogen free of the above mentioned defects involved in fossil fuel has not been developed. As the conventional method for production of hydrogen, there can be mentioned a water gas preparing method, a petroleum reforming method and a cracking method. However, all of these conventional methods depend on fossil fuel and inevitably use fossil fuel as the raw material. Therefore, the foregoing defects cannot be avoided by the conventional methods of producing hydrogen. Moreover, a chemical method for preparing hydrogen by thermal decomposition of water has not been established, and the prospect of industrialization of this method is still dim.